


a scar that looks just like you

by endquestionmark



Category: Jurassic World (2015)
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-18
Updated: 2015-06-18
Packaged: 2018-04-05 00:48:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4159290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It isn’t the first time that they’ve run a scent drill. Owen’s been training them on scraps of liver and scent pads since they were eight weeks old or so, using fabric with his scent on it and the positive reinforcement of touch and food. Ideally they’ll focus on the former and associate him a little more obliquely with the latter. The trouble has always been not the tracking but the alert, because when the raptors pick up a scent, they treat it as a game, and when they locate the subject, they do what they always do, which is play.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a scar that looks just like you

**Author's Note:**

> I am fired. You are fired. Everyone is fired. In particular, [Nell](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nellie/pseuds/Cthonical), [Ev](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rivers), and [Cat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/indigostohelit) are _extremely_ fired for enabling this and inspiring large swathes of it. Once again: nobody literally fucks a raptor. That's all I've got going for me.

It isn’t the first time that they’ve run a scent drill. Owen’s been training them on scraps of liver and scent pads since they were eight weeks old or so, using fabric with his scent on it and the positive reinforcement of touch and food. Ideally they’ll focus on the former and associate him a little more obliquely with the latter. The trouble has always been not the tracking but the alert, because when the raptors pick up a scent, they treat it as a game, and when they locate the subject, they do what they always do, which is play.

At twelve weeks, Barry had loosed a trained pig to call the raptors back into the enclosed area of the paddock, and hadn’t dropped the jammed gate on the pig in time. It had made a break for it, following the perimeter of the enclosure, but Delta had headed it off, and Echo and Blue had circled it before closing in. Owen is under no impressions about the animals that he’s raising and training: they are predators, and highly intelligent, at that, and it had shown when they had let the pig do its best, bolting for the undergrowth ten feet at a time as they circled and jostled for space. It hadn’t quite gotten to cover when Echo snapped at its heels in a spray of red, and even though someone had kicked the gate back into working order by then, the pig had screamed, fear and pain all at once, and there had been no particular point in delaying the inevitable.

It’s two weeks later, and if the raptors are following any of the theoretical growth charts that Wu’s labs had cranked out for reference then they’re about half the size they’ll be when full-grown. Accelerated growth would have been a hindrance rather than a help given the amount of training and testing that InGen wanted to carry out, and as fast as his girls learn, Owen is still aware that he has to make every second count. Asset containment is out in the valleys north of the resort, something to do with pachys and dominance displays that hadn’t been taken into account by their structural engineers. Still, the raptors are ungainly with growth, and it’s far easier to give them commands when he’s on the same eye level as them.

Today they’re tracking a stale scent, one of the pig handlers who decided that tropical weather and extensive non-disclosure agreements was not for him, following a day-old trail that loops around the open jungle, tacking northwest and looping through some of the muddier ground in the enclosure before ending at a uniform shirt draped over a branch ten minutes’ run from the enclosure. Barry’s up on the catwalks with a stun gun, just in case, and Owen cuts through the jungle, taking the most direct path possible to the stand-in subject. He can hear Charlie trilling somewhere in the far-off distance, though that’s no indicator of where the rest of the pack is; she’s even more awkward than the rest of them, constantly trying to pick up mannerisms from Blue and Echo, though she doesn’t have the body mass to pull them off just yet.

The sky is still light, and the jungle still sun-baked warm from a clear day, but the shadows are lengthening a little as the sun dips behind the mountains, and Owen hopes that the pack finishes their run soon. He doesn’t mind working with them at night but he’d like a little warning, and he clicks his tongue absently as he reaches the clearing. In the distance, there’s the rustle of leaves and the clapping of wings. The light is oblique, streaming golden through the trees — _red sky at night_ — and he squints as he steps into the open, leaf litter soft and springy underfoot. There are pieces, here, of something, but he can’t quite see the whole; the shirt is fluttering more than it should be, maybe, and the jungle is quieter than it should be, too, as the daylight and diurnal populations overlap, but nothing here is particularly natural to begin with, so maybe it isn’t—

Something hits him in the small of the back, squarely, and Owen doesn’t even have time to think, and no breath to verbalize, before he’s facedown on the ground, and the jungle is anything but silent now, with the raptors circling him — he can see their claws, tapping, and the way Charlie is scraping one foot along the ground, nervous as ever — and that’s Delta, then, with her weight on his spine. Not for the first time, he’s grateful for her avian mannerisms, and the fact that she hasn’t put her full weight onto his kidneys, particularly given the placement of her claws. Echo and Blue are snarling at each other again, and one of these days that’s going to be a problem, especially given Echo’s wary distrust of Owen, but then she backs down, and it’s Blue cocking her head curiously at Owen, sprawled at her feet, and he remembers that he has more immediate concerns.

“Blue,” he says, as Delta backs off, and she snaps at him, a warning rather than a threat, but still a reminder of who, precisely, is at whose mercy right now. “Easy,” Owen murmurs, “easy, girl,” and she vocalizes, the chattering amusement that he hears most often as anticipation for a run or a feeding or attention, but here and now it’s very different, and he can’t help but wonder how anyone ever thought that they could control raptors. Hoskins has no idea what he’s talking about, has never come close enough for one of them to catch his scent, and he wouldn’t know that this is something that he would never be able to understand, for all that he calls himself a dog of war.

When humans laugh at someone weaker than them, it comes with context; it’s mocking or derisive or cruel. When Blue does, it’s so much simpler; it’s the inevitable conclusion of a hunt, of something that Owen made himself part of despite having no place in their world except as prey. When Blue leans down, then, and snaps, he rolls over, a calculated motion of trust and submission, baring his throat and his belly, and she doesn’t startle, but her pupils contract and then expand, the way that they typically do before she pounces, and she leans down, very slowly and very carefully, jaws wide, and closes them around his throat.

Echo is barking, now, excited and anticipatory, but Owen can barely hear it over the roar of blood in his ears, and the uncontrollable hammering of his heart. He’s seen Blue snap bones with less effort than it would take her to bite halfway through his throat, and pain blooms where her teeth are digging into his skin. Delta noses at his abdomen, chirping curiously, and Charlie comes a little closer, tilting her head, and Blue is just holding him still, the metallic tang of blood in the air. He knows she can taste it, and feel the rush of his pulse; she’s learning him the way she learns all her prey, and now she knows where to bite, where to slash to leave him bleeding his life away in great warm rushes, beyond flight.

She doesn’t, though, and he stares up at the darkening sky and the patterns of the leaves and holds himself absolutely still, goes completely limp and lets her push him down by his throat into the leaf litter. Echo barks, then, and he feels the tip of a claw against his abdomen, and when she leans the slightest amount of weight into it, the pain is a bright burst for a moment, and then something deeper and less remarkable, more impact than incision. Blue growls in warning, and he feels that too, against his trachea, and it takes every ounce of control he has not to try to twist away from Echo’s claw in his guts, from how strange it feels — as if his skin is stretched tight; his hands are clenched so tightly by his head that he can feel his nails breaking skin — and how wrong the pain is.

Echo doesn’t listen, or doesn’t care, to Blue’s assertion, though, and pulls a little harder, and Owen can’t help the noise he makes at that, air forced up his windpipe by sheer visceral reflex. Blue growls again, and Owen can barely see through the ongoing pressure and the stink of iron, and in a minute, in a second he’s going to either black out or snap entirely, the way all the raptors’ prey does eventually. Owen already thinks like them enough of the time, and between the pain and the reflex of it he’ll resort entirely to instinct, kicking them away and scrambling for shelter, and he can’t expect them not to chase him if he hands himself to them like that, and, again: inevitability.

Half a minute, maybe, ten seconds: he isn’t counting, but time just stretches with the slow ragged rip of Echo’s claw, and it could be a moment or a year later that Blue drops Owen and lunges, bodily knocking Echo away. Charlie finds her courage, then, and darts in to snap at Echo’s tail, and Echo turns on her, all red-stained claws and reflexive fury, before Blue snaps at her throat, and they’re away, just like that, into the night. Delta pauses, still nudging at Owen, and his blood is a bright stripe across her muzzle, and she pauses to lick delicately where his shirt is torn and dark. She’s gentle, as ever, more curious than anything, but he can’t suppress the way he flinches away, a full-body motion, and she startles a little, cocks her head at him before disappearing into the shadows, bounding away towards the sound of breaking branches.

Owen just lies there for a moment. He runs careful fingers down his side, feeling his way by touch and by pain; right up to the edge of the gash, he’s all right, and then it’s like touching a live wire; he doesn’t even register the pain before he’s arching away from it, curling in on himself like something feral and frightened. He presses further, and, somehow, Echo hasn’t breached the abdominal cavity. He’ll need stitches, probably, but he can do those, and he probably shouldn’t play tug-of-war with the pack for a week or two, but it could be worse. He’ll probably piss blood for a few days, too, given how hard — Echo? — he’d been taken down to begin with, but those are just bruises, and it’s only when he sits up that he feels warmth on his throat, and realizes that Blue had bitten through skin after all, albeit as gently as possible.

His heart is still pounding, but it isn’t urgent, and the nocturnal chatter of the jungle is filtering back through, and Owen drags himself to lean up against a tree, and press his left hand against the torn edges just under his last floating rib, and tips his head back against rough bark. It’s been a long time coming, this sudden shift in power; the pack has probably been able to take him down for a while, but they haven’t tried, and now they are all aware of it. Blue recognizes him as someone she can learn from, at least for the moment, but Echo is less concerned with taking directions and more concerned with the instincts that they didn’t try to select out, because InGen bred raptors for a reason.

Beautiful: they were beautiful, is what Owen has been trying not to articulate, or to admit; either way, it’s not something he should be thinking, especially now, of all times, when he’s still bleeding a little bit too much to ignore, and dizzy with relief, and hard. Despite the pain, and the terror, and the risk that the pack will double back and finish what they started, Owen’s hard, and breathless with it, and riding the residual adrenaline that kept him still and silent he grinds down with the heel of his hand, and the pressure is so good that he sighs, entirely unconscious, and freezes automatically, listening for the snap of twigs or the hiss of breath. There’s nothing, or there are at least the normal sounds of the jungle settling into its nocturnal rhythms, and he scrambles for his belt, shoves his hand into his pants.

Owen doesn’t know how long he’s been hard, but he’s a filthy mess, between the blood and sweat and the rising humidity of the evening; when he thumbs over the head of his cock, he’s sticky-wet, and it probably isn’t blood, but he can smell it, still, in the air. He digs his fingers into his ribs against sense and survival instinct, just for the jolt of pain, only slightly lessened, and bites his lip against the choked cry that dies in his throat, and smears slick over his fingers. It’s good in a way that it hasn’t been for a long time, whether that’s the near-death experience or the adrenaline or the way he’s aware of every inch of his surroundings, hyperalert and thrumming with sensation. He pushes into his hand until he can feel the bruises over his spine blooming dark and tender, and he can’t smell blood now so much as sweat, and sex, and broken branches and earth.

It isn’t enough, even so, though, and he tips his head back, making throaty noises that he can’t quite stifle, and his fingers find their way back to his ribs, and there it is, blood collecting under his skin, deep bruises that’ll bloom green and black. That’s good, the aching pressure of it, and he tips his head to feel the pull of the punctures there, the stress knotted up in his shoulders, and he digs his fingers into the wet bloody warmth of his side, fingertips skating over smooth tissue, under all of it, and he comes as if it’s been yanked out of him, entirely overwhelming and vulnerable. It’s like being gutted, all over again, but as if Echo had finished the job, and left him to bleed out; Owen breathes through it, great deep gasps, and wipes his hand through the dirt, brushes himself off, before he pulls himself back together.

He’s bleeding even harder now, and stitches aren’t going to be fun, especially if he’s too woozy to do them himself, even though Barry would probably do a neater job and would only look at him a little reproachfully. It’ll heal ugly, a big raised mess of a scar across his side, and he still has the bite marks on his neck to deal with, and getting to his feet isn’t remotely enjoyable, not with the bruising. It’s going to be twenty minutes back to the paddock, if he takes it slow, or thirty, if he takes it careful as well. The pack is still out there, and Owen has work in the morning. He couldn’t have asked for anything more.

 


End file.
